Almost from the moment I Tweeted a photo from my chat with the Australian actor Eric Bana last week, I’ve been hearing from various women around the office who, for lack of a better analogy, are melting like butter on a hot stack of pancakes over the man’s hunkiness (I guess I’m not actually lacking a better analogy, but that’s the one I’m going with).

Bana puts his charms to excellent use in his new thriller Closed Circuit—costarring Rebecca Hall and Jim Broadbent—but I’m also happy to report that in addition to being a bonafide beefcake, Bana is an engaging, fun guy. Although he plays a lot of serious roles (they don’t get much more grim than that of his terrorist-tracking assassin in Steven Spielberg’s Munich), Bana started out doing stand-up comedy, so he has a healthy and endearingly ironic perspective when it comes to the business of being a movie star.

Here’s a video blog of our conversation. Bana talks about how some thrillers cheat their audiences with outrageous twists; how his beloved father-in-law, a leading Australian judge, influenced his role as a lawyer in Closed Circuit; and why sometimes the most serious-minded movies are the ones that are the most fun to shoot.

Film Review: ‘Closed Circuit’Opening a week after Bradley Manning’s sentencing in the U.S., where significant portions of the case were held in secret to protect national security, British courtroom thriller “Closed Circuit” challenges the validity of policies that shield key evidence from public scrutiny. Since the topic itself isn’t especially sexy, screenwriter Steven Knight cooks up a plot in which a pair of defense lawyers who were once a couple find themselves on opposite sides of the secrecy divide, injecting romantic intrigue into this slick, smarter-than-usual conspiracy yarn — a late-summer counter-programmer for those who prefer brain stimulation to having their eyeballs and eardrums pummeled.

'Closed Circuit' trains its lens on complex conspiracyIt's a compelling conspiracy thriller that grabs our attention from the first reel and keeps viewers on edge with its engaging performances and timely story.

Suspenseful and relevant political thrillers are a too-rare commodity, especially during the summer months. Even more unusual are conspiracy tales that don't rely on gunplay, gimmickry or explosive effects to keep the audience's attention.

Closed Circuit (*** out of four; rated R; opening Wednesday nationwide) is not only an intelligent, well-told and deftly acted story, it provides refreshing counter-programming in a season filled with noisy, uninspired sequels and mindless action movies.MORE AT USA TODAY WEBSITE

"Closed Circuit," the story of a high-profile terrorist bomber case, draws on the legacy of 1970s political thrillers like "The Parallax View" and "Three Days of a Condor" to create a film that feels very much of the moment.

The political and social events that fed paranoia about bureaucratic malfeasance in that decade -- the Pentagon Papers and Vietnam -- have changed, giving way to things like Wikileaks or Edward Snowden. Yet the anxiety remains, and gives the low-budget thriller opening Wednesday a weightiness beyond its conventional story of two lawyers caught in a vast government conspiracy.

"We worked with Julian Assange, we planted Snowden, he’s in our holding cell in Russia right now," Eric Bana joked to TheWrap.

Rebecca Hall and Bana bondedRebecca Hall found working with Eric Bana "refreshing" because he is so much fun.

Rebecca Hall was shocked by how "strikingly funny" Eric Bana was when they worked together.

The two stars teamed up for Closed Circuit, in which they play lawyers who become bound together while defending a high-profile terrorism case.

Rebecca enjoyed working so closely with Eric, who she believes is an incredibly misunderstood actor.

"It was great!" she told Collider of collaborating with Eric. "One of the things that nobody really expects about him is that he's strikingly funny and has a great sense of humour. He often plays very serious characters, but he started as a stand-up comic, so he's incredibly quick-witted. That was refreshing to find out, and great fun to be around."

The movie also stars Jim Broadbent, Julia Stiles and Anne-Marie Duff. It was directed by John Crowley, who has been praised for his ability to get the best out of the people he works with.

Rebecca found him a joy to be around on set and believes other directors could learn quite a lot from him."He is fastidious. He pays serious attention to the details," she explained. "Instead of throwing the text out and asking

for a rewrite, theatre directors will work at it with the actors and try to find a solution, which is often the way you find original and creative moments, rather than reducing things to stuff that's pat and easy

to get. I also think he's got a really good eye for suspense. He knows how to wield the camera in a w

ay that will watch what you want to be looking at. I think he's a really, really clever filmmaker, and he's very good with actors. He's the win-win combination."

BANA talks NSA DEBATE and SNOWDEN with POLITICOEric Bana’s new film — “Closed Circuit” — is a thriller that revolves around such themes as terrorism, government snooping and the balance between legal rights and national security.

Sound timely?

“I guess it was, in a way, quite fortuitous for us that it’s turned out this way,” Bana told POLITICO when asked how his film hits a current events sweet spot given such timely topics as Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency.

“Closed Circuit,” which is set in London, follows two lawyers as they attempt to uncover a British Secret Service cover-up in the wake of a London bombing, all under the watchful eye of the country’s closed-circuit camera surveillance (Bana plays the British defense barrister, Martin Vickers). Bana says that, while the film primarily serves to entertain, it does end up being a critique of the British legal system.

“I think it inadvertently enters into that realm,” Bana said. “There’s a bit of a potshot taken at the security services and the government to a degree, but it serves our narrative and it helps ramp up the drama.”

Bana says that the news emanating out of the United States about Snowden and NSA surveillance happened after he had finished shooting.

“Most of it was occurring in post-production so it was interesting, the last few months, in particular with the Snowden stuff, to realize there are parallels being drawn.”

As for Bana, he says he wrestles with the very questions about balancing security and privacy raised in “Closed Circuit.”